Slotted spoons are your best friends when making sous-vide eggs. Megan Willett/Tech Insider When it comes to eggs, most of us have scrambled and over easy down, but poached and soft boiled eggs often remain elusive.

So when I started testing the Anova precision cooker, which helps you cook sous-vide foods in a pot of water, I knew I wanted to try two things: sous-vide steak and eggs.

Sous vide means "under vacuum" in French, and it refers to the process of cooking food in a temperature-controlled-water-bath environment for longer than normal cooking times.

Calling eggs made with the Anova "sous vide" is something of a misnomer. Unlike other sous-vide techniques where you need a plastic and/or vacuum sealed bag to hold your food in hot water, the eggs already have the perfect cover — their shells — and can just bob around in there.

But don't be fooled. Plastic bags or no, sous vide eggs still take some effort, and depending on which technique you wanted to try, more equipment than you'd expect.

Hard boiled eggs

Megan Willett/Tech Insider

I tried to make hard boiled sous vide eggs twice and was disappointed each time. I'm not sure if the eggs I was using were too big or if they needed more time than most recipes called for, but the whites were way too loose around the yolk.

Following the instructions, I placed the eggs in my 165 degree-Fahrenheit water and let them float around at the bottom of the pot for 45 minutes. It's such an easy recipe, I thought nothing could go wrong.

But when the timer went off and I broke into the shell, I found that while the whites were solid, they weren't as firm as I would have liked. If you try hard-boiled sous-vide eggs and like your whites to be a little more solid, I would leave them in for another 10 minutes.

The yolk, on the other hand, was perfect. Not too dry, still creamy, and firm. If only the egg whites had matched!

2/

Soft boiled eggs

Megan Willett/Tech Insider

Hard boiled eggs were the easiest to make: heat up your water in the pot, drop in your eggs, and take them out when the timer was done. Soft boiled eggs, on the other hand, required a separate pot of water, an ice bath, and then some cooking time in the Anova-heated water bath. It was a little obnoxious.

The Serious Eats recipe on the Anova app called for three minutes in a boiling pot of water, then a minute in an ice bath, followed by 45 minutes in the sous-vide water at 145 degrees Fahrenheit.

While this would be hard to justify if you were only cooking one soft-boiled egg (like I was), this process would speed up cooking times if you were making, say, a brunch or dinner for a lot of people. The end result was impeccable, too.

3/

Poached eggs

Megan Willett/Tech Insider

Out of the three techniques I tried, sous vide seems best matched if you want to poach a whole bunch of eggs.

Just like the soft boiled eggs, poached sous vide eggs also required a separate pot of water. First, you let your egg float around for 45 minutes in 145 degrees Fahrenheit water. Once the timer stops, take out your egg with a slotted spoon and slowly break it open. Some runny whites will come out, but don't worry — you don't need those.

Then, slip the wobbly egg into a simmering pot of water and let the egg whites firm up for about a minute.

The result was the best poached egg I've ever made. Because poaching eggs is so difficult — I mean, look at how many YouTube videos are dedicated to the task— I gave up trying to make them after a few failed attempts.

In the future if I ever want to make poached eggs again, I would turn to the sous vide machine first.